TAUS Blog

Discussions around how the robots will take over and human interaction will be replaced by bot interaction are sweeping across almost every social scene. Recently, companies like Amazon and Starbucks have announced new innovations that intentionally minimize the need to interact with other people even further. Although online shopping still sometimes requires you to open the door to a postman, even that basic interaction is under siege. This shift away from human interactions has been decades in the making, but with technological developments offered at lower cost it’s now gained pace.

TAUS Asia Conference returned to Beijing in March, and welcomed business leaders and academics from across the Asia Pacific region. The event focused on major developments within machine translation (MT) and machine learning (ML), and how these innovations can help Chinese businesses engage with a global audience. The annual event also championed innovation in the language services industry and the development of certain translation technologies.

Data are indispensable in almost any business and industry these days. The translation and content delivery industry is no exception. Data are the key to efficiency improvements (think of machine translation and translation memory leveraging) and to quality control and process management and automation. TAUS has a unique position in the global translation industry as a neutral and independent language data network.

Report on the 13th TAUS QE Summit that took place on April 11, 2018 at Microsoft (Dublin, Ireland).

Technologies sometimes evolve at a faster pace than we as humans are able to keep up to. Powered by technology, intelligent platforms, automated workflows and efficient distribution processes, translations easily become invisible and so does the workforce behind it. In an effort to rely on technology to help us do our work and continuously measure and manage its increasing impact on our future, we need to be able to dynamically adjust our requirements, make decisions that are based on data and not opinions and finally, put our trust in the power of distributed, invisible workforces. That also counts for the way we evaluate translation quality.

Captains of the Translation Industry Talk About the Single Biggest Thing They've Learnt

TAUS spoke with Chris Pyne, Senior Manager Partner Development at SAP. At the core of the conversation lies this question: ''What is the single biggest lesson that you have learnt about the translation industry?''

Captains of the Translation Industry Talk About the Single Biggest Thing They've Learnt

TAUS spoke with Ivan Smolnikov, CEO and founder of Smartcat. At the core of the conversation lies this question: ''What is the single biggest lesson that you have learnt about the translation industry?''

For the past years we have been organizing the TAUS Game Changers Innovation Contests, but always on the west coast of North America. It was time to look towards the East and find out more about the innovations happening in China. Nine companies signed up to join the contest, a majority of them Chinese or China-based. As always, each presenter had 6 minutes only to showcase why their perspective, idea, or technology is the most innovative and game changing. Never before have the presenters been so amazing at finishing their presentation before the 6 minutes were over.

On Wednesday 21 March, 2018, TAUS Director Jaap van der Meer received the title of ‘Honorary Professor’ from the Beijing Language and Culture University for his outstanding achievements in the global translation industry. For this occasion he was invited to give a guest lecture to the students of Translation Studies Faculty of the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU).

On 22-23 March, 2018, part of the TAUS team was in Beijing for the TAUS Asia Conference. It was the sixth time that TAUS came to China, but we quickly realized that it should actually be an annual event on our calendar. This was the first TAUS conference ever hosted by a university, namely the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU).

Translation automation has recently experienced a major shakeup – the emergence of neural MT*. This marks the start of a new journey of exploration into the opportunities and limitations of machine learning (ML) in translation and language technology more generally.